As a proud member of the LGTV community (yes I'm making 2 of those kinds of jokes back to back, fight me), and an occasional reddit user, I'm both horrified by the notion of getting this update and thrilled people are still using old.reddit.com. The new layout, which isn't even new anymore, still falls very short for it I'm looking something up and it's buried in a comment thread where ctrl-f can't find it.
The management of reddit doesn't seem to use reddit at all and they seem to be unaware of the fact that a) the "new" layout just isn't that great, and b) their mobile app is terrible.
They killed third-party apps, which were way better than their garbage app and they don't seem to realize how much it annoys their users.
Sigh, power user doesn't mean the individual is an alien with some quirky taste. Oh, the contrary. It means someone who has a wider spectrum and those who are not power users are still on the spectrum, but theirs is shorter, but overlap with the PU's. So if it is good for the power users it is almost always good for the rest of the world. Let that sink in.
I noticed a day or two ago they quietly turned on the 'show new reddit as default' preference option, it was still possible to change default back but they won't stop pushing it.
No, the subreddit has applied custom css to do that. It's the mildly infuriating subreddit. There's also an image of a hair visible on widescreen monitors, to make you think there's a hair on your display.
I only use old.reddit.com when I am forced to sulk back over there and actually log in. To just look around I just use some redlib frontend.
The numerous layers of attempted monetization schemes since 2016ish hilariously touted as "features" are sort of band-aided on top of each other on new reddit in a way that makes it the worst possible way to display the information. It's like a terrible UI challenge.
I have poor eyesight and I don’t support this practice of linking old reddit on HN. Old website is unusable for me. I have to load the link in the native app to read it.
ctrl+F doesn’t work anyway as the comments are also buried in a “load more comments” on old reddit too. New website and app have a search comments field.
I have shitty eyesight and old is the only version that’s usable to me because text zooming works far better in the old layout. Are you using a screen reader by any chance?
Get the OLED panels from whoever makes them wholesale, spend on a beautiful enclosure / design, add just enough software to calibrate the image and switch between HDMI inputs with HDMI-CEC. Sell a premium soundbar as an add-on instead of including speakers in the base device.
I think a brand like Sonos could make a killing in this market selling a premium dumb tv to high end customers.
Look at how much markup Samsung adds to their standard LCD panel for a decent enclosure - it’s like $600-$1000 markup to get the Frame tv, which has a mid panel, JUST because the enclosure is actually nice/inoffensive.
The hitch is that it would be more expensive, making it a "premium" product and limiting the market. Smart TV pricing typically includes subsidies based on the assumed data sales from each user over the lifetime of the device.
Yes I am suggesting a premium product, there’s at least $600-$1000 more the market is willing to pay just for aesthetics based on Samsung Frame tv, which is a premium product with mid-range LCD component quality. It’s priced about $200 underneath Samsung’s top of the line OLED
I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable. Meta has infinitely more rich data and an entire tightly optimized ad system and is on a platform where people commonly make large purchases and makes around $10 per user per year.
> I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable.
According to a 2021 article about Vizio's user-hostile advert display devices, they boast of an average revenue of $13/yr - up from $7.30/yr, though consider this was 2020 when more people were at-home watching TV instead of going outside, meeting people, touching grass, the usual.
> A range of advertising opportunities drive revenue, including revenue sharing with programmers and distribution partners as well as activations on the device home screen. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company said average revenue per user on SmartCast was $12.99, up from $7.31 in the same period of 2019.
-------------
If you'll allow me to make an arbitrary assumption that a new TV set bought today will last about 10 years, then $13/yr means the advertising revenue implies Vizio has reduced the sale-price of their TVs by $130 compared to before we had no-opt-out advertising displayed on our own property as a condition for the privilege of using said device.
It would not be cheap. All that ad crap represents revenue, and all those features represent sales volume for feature-conscious customers. Without volume you don’t have supplier leverage on pricing, or the ability to get onto big box store shelves, reducing volume further.
I for one would be willing to pay a premium for what GP described. I’d honestly pay twice as much for a TV with working HDMI CEC, some simple picture adjustment controls, and a really really good panel. Nothing else, please.
We need Framework-style company making local/owner-first everything, including fridges and washing machines today. There’s no guarantee that your next coffee machine or teapot won’t come with AI talking to you.
I too am irritated by their software but they do make nice hardware. I’d have their headphones if I trusted their software, the hardware is perfect IMO. Open and upgradable is not really their forte though.
I’ve used some of my friends more recent year TVs and even if they’re not networked the UX is just horrible. One Samsung model eliminated the “input” button on the remote and forces you to go through “Home” to select inputs in a tiled menu festooned with quick tips and baked in ads for Samsung stuff like SmartThings. The worst part is that if it detects an input is connected to a game console, then it moves that input to the Gaming tab, which is chock full of tiles for shit like Solitare, Samsung game store, etc. WTF.
It’s like every interaction is viewed as an opportunity to sell attention or get you to mis-click on an ad.
One thing you could try is to get a third party remote. The input switching functionality may still exist and be reachable. At least, it worked for mine.
What I want is simply a well-made monitor with a single HDMI input and built-in speakers. Make it as flat as you want.
The rest is almost unnecessary in this day and age.
If everyone were to do this, it would open a bigger market for a well-made upgradable combo smart device and air TV tuner that the TV manufacturers could produce if they wanted to.
I’d like this as well, except I think more than one HDMI port would be useful, for something like a game console. Maybe the screen itself could have 1 to keep it simple, with an optional HDMI switch that could integrate cleanly.
I would buy this in a heartbeat. I am profoundly bothered by the slop software that is on every TV these days. I keep joking that as tech invades more and more corners of our lives, we will at some point in the future be helping our parents with their couches by saying "Have you tried restarting your couch?"
Don't get me wrong, tech is great when it's a value-add, but TV tech has gotten out of control.
I don't know why my sense of ethical outrage over the cancerous spread of this worthless garbage technology doesn't extend so hard to LG in this. But I've finally just hit the wall with Microsoft. Between all the forced account sign-ins, ads, random reboots and updates that aren't for the purpose of securing the OS...I'm done.
I haven't seen this level of anti-consumer nonsense from Microsoft since the late 90s when lots of circles called them Micro$oft.
It's a shame since Satya Nadella came in and made a lot of right moves. Support for Linux, open source, etc. I could stretch myself to forgive the other stuff as some kind of wrong headed thinking about a cloud-first strategy. But in the last few years that productive pivot stopped and the company moved back into high-risk money grab steps.
My current daily driver is a Windows machine, but my last few builds around the house have all been some kind of Linux. Last year I moved my home server infrastructure over. I kept a windows VM around for a few things but it ultimately corrupted itself and was replaced by a Linux VM that's been chugging along just fine.
I think when I rebuild my home desktop sometime next year Windows gets relegated to a "run when needed" VM. I've really only kept it around for games and a few other Windows only software but those days are fast fading thanks to numerous efforts by Valve and others and a fallback VM for other stuff works fine in my experience elsewhere.
I think I don't have the same concerns about LG because the relationship with me as the consumer seems different somehow, and I simply expect less from them?
I think them sneaking in and turning on that LivePlus feature is far more nefarious. The fact they can track whatever you watch and do to serve you personalized ads is insane.
Using such a TV as a computer monitor sounds dicey. There will eventually be a data breach of the uploaded screenshots, assuming they aren't able to fingerprint entirely on device.
Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.
It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.
Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.
There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.
> There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k
I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.
This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.
Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side.
There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.
There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.
I bought the top of the line TV from Samsung in 2011. The 'smart' functionality services went offline after a year or two, which means all 'smart' functions no longer work and I am now happily using it as a dumb TV.
Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
> Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
Except that on newer tvs all the nagging will still be there, all the ads will be "frozen" in time (mine has ads for stuff from 2023, the last time I connected it for some firmware update that _GASPS_ actually fixed some things) and some features may depend on internet connectivity. The manufacturer may care to release a final update and solve these issues, but you know they are much more likely to fraudulently just disable features that worked offline as a last middle finger.
Repeat with me, SaaS is fraud. Proprietary digital platforms are fraud.
I think you underestimate how shameless the vendors can be. I imagine in a couple of years the TVs will refuse to function unless periodically connected to the Internet to get updated ads and an updated firmware so that you can't jailbreak them...
It is interesting. Arstechnica just had an article about how to get a dumb tv, which I saw on google news. I want to believe there is a tide turning among non-hn peoples ( I tried various phrasings and neither worked in terms of exclusion ).
I just read that, too. Its interesting and somewhat depressing that the best option for the last 10+ years according to ars and this linked reddit thead, and comments in this thread all suggesting Apple TV. I hope to see a viable foss option soon.
There are options like LibreELEC (Jeff Geerling did a video on setup a year ago[0]). However, these options are rarely plug and play. It also doesn’t let people simply download and use apps from the popular streaming services. They tend to rely on pirated content or someone who is willing to rip all their own physical media for more convenient access. FOSS has always had an issue with that last 10% of the user experience, and the services to make things pleasant to use, which I think really hurts mainstream adoption.
I only read the reddit comments down to the point where the slanted lines became mildly infuriating and switched new reddit to continue, and there only down to the "view more comments" button, and didn't see anyone saying what Copilot actually does on the TV.
The comments seemed to all be about the nefarious things people were speculating it could be doing, how to block smart TVs from updating, etc., and that's also how the comments here are going.
A bit of research suggests that it is just another app. If you don't open it it won't be doing anything. If you open it you can use it as a virtual assistant to do things like check the weather, search streaming service for content, and that sort of thing.
I wonder how this went down. "Hey LG, this is the Microsofts. Just had an idea how we could give your entire customer base the middle finger, wanna hear it?"
What is legitimately the expected use case for Copilot on a TV?
TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?
I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.
Just did that yesterday because it disables updates. I had stopped updating and disconnected my TV from the Internet completely in 2021 in fear that an update will bring ads, and in hope that a jailbreak will come around eventually.
TV industry's in a pathetic state when customers reasonably consider Apple TVs to be required included costs. In other news, my new 'smart' GE oven crashes roughly once each month into unresponsiveness for several hours. Where's an Apple Oven to save the day?
I use a tablet as smart TV. As a bonus it's portable around my house. I'll look into Linux tablets when Android will get too obnoxious to bear. Are they a thing? Basically I need VLC and not much more.
Is there a DNS filtering list anywhere that just blocks these firmware updates? That would be the easiest way to maintain dumbification without getting into hacking the software while still allowing streaming services.
It’s well worth the $100 or whatever to do all the streaming through an AppleTV. It’s the only streaming device I’ve used that doesn’t seem to constantly try to upsell random garbage.
This is the answer. AppleTV is worth its weight in gold. Well supported and quality apps, good connectivity options, enough horsepower for hardware decoding, and Apple has a good reputation for privacy (hello no ACR).
Till yourself get hacked because the connected-to-the-internet TV is running an insecure software version. We should legal action the hell out of such practices.
I really use to like LG products, but between your link and this, I will never buy LG again. They were added to the same list Samsung was added to years ago.
It is like these companies do not want to sell what people really want, but only want to spy on you. The way things are going, it will be back to the old crt TVs, which you can still find used if you look hard enough.
Yeah I would have switched from Apple to Samsung years ago but Samsung are agregious when it comes to control and privacy I don't want to have anything from them in the house.
The Korean car brands, Hyundai and Kia also have a terrible privacy story. They really do regard their customers as the product.
Why does a TV need Microsoft Copilot? While I think AI on the whole is a long-term net positive, but I just cannot understand Microsoft's insistence on putting Copilot everywhere. Even in places where it has no business being and against the user's wishes. I cannot remember the last time a company was this tone deaf. Why isn't Satya Nadella personally getting involved already? Seriously inexcusable.
As a reminder, turn off the "Live Plus" thing on your LG TV. This "option" makes your LG TV spy on you, tracking and reporting what you watch based on the image that is shown on the TV.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
The enshittification of our world is beyond words.
Ah! I can finally chat to my TV by writing text to it and have it hallucinate shows that don't exist, or tell me I'm right about everything. Possibly even create PR for work from my LG smart TV, my boss will be pleased.
As a proud member of the LGTV community (yes I'm making 2 of those kinds of jokes back to back, fight me), and an occasional reddit user, I'm both horrified by the notion of getting this update and thrilled people are still using old.reddit.com. The new layout, which isn't even new anymore, still falls very short for it I'm looking something up and it's buried in a comment thread where ctrl-f can't find it.
The management of reddit doesn't seem to use reddit at all and they seem to be unaware of the fact that a) the "new" layout just isn't that great, and b) their mobile app is terrible.
They killed third-party apps, which were way better than their garbage app and they don't seem to realize how much it annoys their users.
I thank them for that, because forcing me back to their horrid app broke me of my habit of hanging out there.
I’ve got six digits of karma, and I’d rather walk away than suffer through its awful UI.
Same. Only thing that ever managed to break me of my reddit habit. No 3rd party apps? Reddit may as well no longer exist as far as I'm concerned.
As a none user; what is a karma? Fantasy points?
Yes. It’s profile points. You earn one per upvote on your content. Just like here on HN
They don't care about their users, they trapped people in and people aren't migrating to alternatives in droves.
More importantly they serve ads and capture all of the revenue from them
I disagree, I think the new layout and the app are bad for Reddit power users. But for someone brand new to Reddit today they work fine.
And that’s the point. They care about boosting their user base, not satisfying power users.
Sigh, power user doesn't mean the individual is an alien with some quirky taste. Oh, the contrary. It means someone who has a wider spectrum and those who are not power users are still on the spectrum, but theirs is shorter, but overlap with the PU's. So if it is good for the power users it is almost always good for the rest of the world. Let that sink in.
They are doing everything they can to increase number of users before IPO.
Redit from a text based place, became a place driven by pictures (Can we call that "instagrami-zation"?).
The thing, is that discussion is what made reddit good. Now it's mostly low quality pictures, bots and comments written by marketers.
Then AI models and google search are trained on this garbage.
I wonder if someone will finally disrupt reddit
actually, when you share a reddit link, HN automatically converts it to old.reddit
> thrilled people are still using old.reddit.com
I noticed a day or two ago they quietly turned on the 'show new reddit as default' preference option, it was still possible to change default back but they won't stop pushing it.
Am I going mad or do some of those old.reddit comments slope downhill?
No, the subreddit has applied custom css to do that. It's the mildly infuriating subreddit. There's also an image of a hair visible on widescreen monitors, to make you think there's a hair on your display.
I went there and saw two hairs, and yeah thought it was a nice funny touch.
I then went back to HN and turns out one of the hairs was real and I needed to clean my laptop screen :)
They have a bag of dirty tricks [0], here are a few highlights including a couple already mentioned:
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/wiki/config/style...I see the hair on my iPhone. That’s a nice touch.
The next step will be adding a web in a corner, to make us think we cracked our touchscreen /s
try eddrit.com
r/mildlyinfuriating seems to have a custom stylesheet that is deliberately mildly infuriating.
I see it too. What the heck?
I only use old.reddit.com when I am forced to sulk back over there and actually log in. To just look around I just use some redlib frontend.
The numerous layers of attempted monetization schemes since 2016ish hilariously touted as "features" are sort of band-aided on top of each other on new reddit in a way that makes it the worst possible way to display the information. It's like a terrible UI challenge.
Protip: https://farside.link/redlib/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1pl...
502 error
I have poor eyesight and I don’t support this practice of linking old reddit on HN. Old website is unusable for me. I have to load the link in the native app to read it.
ctrl+F doesn’t work anyway as the comments are also buried in a “load more comments” on old reddit too. New website and app have a search comments field.
I have shitty eyesight and old is the only version that’s usable to me because text zooming works far better in the old layout. Are you using a screen reader by any chance?
Screen reader is not available on Safari for old reddit. Also zooming the font is not working: I have to scroll a lot and the layout grt all broken.
Oh. TIL, sorry for pushing back
While true some are hidden, old shows a *lot* more and most of my searches for obscure issues don't yield more viral posts
> Old website is unusable for me.
New website is unusable for me.
Assuming the issue with old reddit is font & element size, does zooming in with Ctrl+ not solve the problem?
I agree. I joined reddit when the "new" design was launched - I could never made sense of the old design. Way too cluttered and unreadable.
I wonder how you're using HN then
We need a Framework-style company making TVs.
Get the OLED panels from whoever makes them wholesale, spend on a beautiful enclosure / design, add just enough software to calibrate the image and switch between HDMI inputs with HDMI-CEC. Sell a premium soundbar as an add-on instead of including speakers in the base device.
I think a brand like Sonos could make a killing in this market selling a premium dumb tv to high end customers.
Look at how much markup Samsung adds to their standard LCD panel for a decent enclosure - it’s like $600-$1000 markup to get the Frame tv, which has a mid panel, JUST because the enclosure is actually nice/inoffensive.
The hitch is that it would be more expensive, making it a "premium" product and limiting the market. Smart TV pricing typically includes subsidies based on the assumed data sales from each user over the lifetime of the device.
Yes I am suggesting a premium product, there’s at least $600-$1000 more the market is willing to pay just for aesthetics based on Samsung Frame tv, which is a premium product with mid-range LCD component quality. It’s priced about $200 underneath Samsung’s top of the line OLED
How much are my eyeballs worth over the lifetime of a TV?
In the race to the bottom, ads will outcompete others by pushing price lower. But how much lower?
I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable. Meta has infinitely more rich data and an entire tightly optimized ad system and is on a platform where people commonly make large purchases and makes around $10 per user per year.
> I really doubt the user data for a smart tv user is all that valuable.
According to a 2021 article about Vizio's user-hostile advert display devices, they boast of an average revenue of $13/yr - up from $7.30/yr, though consider this was 2020 when more people were at-home watching TV instead of going outside, meeting people, touching grass, the usual.
https://deadline.com/2021/03/vizio-smart-tv-streaming-ipo-12...
> A range of advertising opportunities drive revenue, including revenue sharing with programmers and distribution partners as well as activations on the device home screen. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company said average revenue per user on SmartCast was $12.99, up from $7.31 in the same period of 2019.
-------------
If you'll allow me to make an arbitrary assumption that a new TV set bought today will last about 10 years, then $13/yr means the advertising revenue implies Vizio has reduced the sale-price of their TVs by $130 compared to before we had no-opt-out advertising displayed on our own property as a condition for the privilege of using said device.
It would not be cheap. All that ad crap represents revenue, and all those features represent sales volume for feature-conscious customers. Without volume you don’t have supplier leverage on pricing, or the ability to get onto big box store shelves, reducing volume further.
I for one would be willing to pay a premium for what GP described. I’d honestly pay twice as much for a TV with working HDMI CEC, some simple picture adjustment controls, and a really really good panel. Nothing else, please.
We need Framework-style company making local/owner-first everything, including fridges and washing machines today. There’s no guarantee that your next coffee machine or teapot won’t come with AI talking to you.
Sonos is a software company with a history of pushing bad updates. But Framework sounds great.
I too am irritated by their software but they do make nice hardware. I’d have their headphones if I trusted their software, the hardware is perfect IMO. Open and upgradable is not really their forte though.
Wouldn't not connecting it online and using a google tv box fix this issue ?
I’ve used some of my friends more recent year TVs and even if they’re not networked the UX is just horrible. One Samsung model eliminated the “input” button on the remote and forces you to go through “Home” to select inputs in a tiled menu festooned with quick tips and baked in ads for Samsung stuff like SmartThings. The worst part is that if it detects an input is connected to a game console, then it moves that input to the Gaming tab, which is chock full of tiles for shit like Solitare, Samsung game store, etc. WTF.
It’s like every interaction is viewed as an opportunity to sell attention or get you to mis-click on an ad.
One thing you could try is to get a third party remote. The input switching functionality may still exist and be reachable. At least, it worked for mine.
We really need laws against products that are still tied to the vendor after you buy them.
If a product needs to be tied to the vendor, it is a service and it should not be sold as a product.
FWIW I do this with a TCL Roku TV and it’s fine. Not great, I still see the Roku interface for ~2secs on startup but otherwise it’s out of my way.
What I want is simply a well-made monitor with a single HDMI input and built-in speakers. Make it as flat as you want.
The rest is almost unnecessary in this day and age.
If everyone were to do this, it would open a bigger market for a well-made upgradable combo smart device and air TV tuner that the TV manufacturers could produce if they wanted to.
I’d like this as well, except I think more than one HDMI port would be useful, for something like a game console. Maybe the screen itself could have 1 to keep it simple, with an optional HDMI switch that could integrate cleanly.
I would buy this in a heartbeat. I am profoundly bothered by the slop software that is on every TV these days. I keep joking that as tech invades more and more corners of our lives, we will at some point in the future be helping our parents with their couches by saying "Have you tried restarting your couch?"
Don't get me wrong, tech is great when it's a value-add, but TV tech has gotten out of control.
Maybe framework will pivot given RAM prices these days
We need regulators that look after interests of tax payers and not after who pays for regulator's yachts.
Well I’m not sure if you can regulate having good design and user experience. Certainly the ability to roll back updates and enforcing privacy though.
It is simple. Let user remove any unwanted software and don't install anything new (as in new apps), without user consent.
I don't know why my sense of ethical outrage over the cancerous spread of this worthless garbage technology doesn't extend so hard to LG in this. But I've finally just hit the wall with Microsoft. Between all the forced account sign-ins, ads, random reboots and updates that aren't for the purpose of securing the OS...I'm done.
I haven't seen this level of anti-consumer nonsense from Microsoft since the late 90s when lots of circles called them Micro$oft.
It's a shame since Satya Nadella came in and made a lot of right moves. Support for Linux, open source, etc. I could stretch myself to forgive the other stuff as some kind of wrong headed thinking about a cloud-first strategy. But in the last few years that productive pivot stopped and the company moved back into high-risk money grab steps.
My current daily driver is a Windows machine, but my last few builds around the house have all been some kind of Linux. Last year I moved my home server infrastructure over. I kept a windows VM around for a few things but it ultimately corrupted itself and was replaced by a Linux VM that's been chugging along just fine.
I think when I rebuild my home desktop sometime next year Windows gets relegated to a "run when needed" VM. I've really only kept it around for games and a few other Windows only software but those days are fast fading thanks to numerous efforts by Valve and others and a fallback VM for other stuff works fine in my experience elsewhere.
I think I don't have the same concerns about LG because the relationship with me as the consumer seems different somehow, and I simply expect less from them?
I think them sneaking in and turning on that LivePlus feature is far more nefarious. The fact they can track whatever you watch and do to serve you personalized ads is insane.
This is matching the levels of surveillance in north Korea. They also have software that takes pictures of your screen every few seconds.
It does this for HDMI inputs as well, BTW.
Using such a TV as a computer monitor sounds dicey. There will eventually be a data breach of the uploaded screenshots, assuming they aren't able to fingerprint entirely on device.
Until somebody releases a dumb TV, you just can't connect your tv to the Internet.
Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/samsung-touches-lcds...
It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.
Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.
There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.
> There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k
I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.
This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.
Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side.
There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.
There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.
I bought the top of the line TV from Samsung in 2011. The 'smart' functionality services went offline after a year or two, which means all 'smart' functions no longer work and I am now happily using it as a dumb TV.
Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
> Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
Except that on newer tvs all the nagging will still be there, all the ads will be "frozen" in time (mine has ads for stuff from 2023, the last time I connected it for some firmware update that _GASPS_ actually fixed some things) and some features may depend on internet connectivity. The manufacturer may care to release a final update and solve these issues, but you know they are much more likely to fraudulently just disable features that worked offline as a last middle finger.
Repeat with me, SaaS is fraud. Proprietary digital platforms are fraud.
In 2011 smart tvs / phones were not quite the data harvesting devices they have become.
The things stopped working because they were for you the consumer.
The modern smart tv will keep working as long is its piping data back to the data retailers, they have a vested interest in keeping it going.
I think you underestimate how shameless the vendors can be. I imagine in a couple of years the TVs will refuse to function unless periodically connected to the Internet to get updated ads and an updated firmware so that you can't jailbreak them...
Yeah, as someone with two of these I would never let them connect to the internet. It’s chock full of ads.
I do connect them to a jailed LAN so I can control them over the network.
We need a "Right to Be Left Alone" law.
At least we still have the right to not buy a TV... (for now?)
It is interesting. Arstechnica just had an article about how to get a dumb tv, which I saw on google news. I want to believe there is a tide turning among non-hn peoples ( I tried various phrasings and neither worked in terms of exclusion ).
I just read that, too. Its interesting and somewhat depressing that the best option for the last 10+ years according to ars and this linked reddit thead, and comments in this thread all suggesting Apple TV. I hope to see a viable foss option soon.
There are options like LibreELEC (Jeff Geerling did a video on setup a year ago[0]). However, these options are rarely plug and play. It also doesn’t let people simply download and use apps from the popular streaming services. They tend to rely on pirated content or someone who is willing to rip all their own physical media for more convenient access. FOSS has always had an issue with that last 10% of the user experience, and the services to make things pleasant to use, which I think really hurts mainstream adoption.
[0] https://youtu.be/3hFas54xFtg
So...?
I only read the reddit comments down to the point where the slanted lines became mildly infuriating and switched new reddit to continue, and there only down to the "view more comments" button, and didn't see anyone saying what Copilot actually does on the TV.
The comments seemed to all be about the nefarious things people were speculating it could be doing, how to block smart TVs from updating, etc., and that's also how the comments here are going.
A bit of research suggests that it is just another app. If you don't open it it won't be doing anything. If you open it you can use it as a virtual assistant to do things like check the weather, search streaming service for content, and that sort of thing.
Copilot usage must be abhorrent when you are pushing it into TVs and making it non-removable application.
I wonder how this went down. "Hey LG, this is the Microsofts. Just had an idea how we could give your entire customer base the middle finger, wanna hear it?"
What is legitimately the expected use case for Copilot on a TV?
TVs are for consuming video. As far as I know, Copilot doesn't generate videos yet, and it certainly won't be possible or cheap enough to generate anything on the level of TV shows or movies any time soon. So are they expecting people will sit in their living room home theater to... chat with Copilot... instead of doing it on their phone?
I genuinely can't come up with any realistic use case where it would be convenient or useful to use Copilot on a TV. It feels utterly deranged that they would put it there.
If supported, rooting is easy. https://cani.rootmy.tv/
Just did that yesterday because it disables updates. I had stopped updating and disconnected my TV from the Internet completely in 2021 in fear that an update will bring ads, and in hope that a jailbreak will come around eventually.
Awful software, I use an Apple TV or firestick to replace it
TV industry's in a pathetic state when customers reasonably consider Apple TVs to be required included costs. In other news, my new 'smart' GE oven crashes roughly once each month into unresponsiveness for several hours. Where's an Apple Oven to save the day?
I use a tablet as smart TV. As a bonus it's portable around my house. I'll look into Linux tablets when Android will get too obnoxious to bear. Are they a thing? Basically I need VLC and not much more.
Is there a DNS filtering list anywhere that just blocks these firmware updates? That would be the easiest way to maintain dumbification without getting into hacking the software while still allowing streaming services.
It’s well worth the $100 or whatever to do all the streaming through an AppleTV. It’s the only streaming device I’ve used that doesn’t seem to constantly try to upsell random garbage.
This is the answer. AppleTV is worth its weight in gold. Well supported and quality apps, good connectivity options, enough horsepower for hardware decoding, and Apple has a good reputation for privacy (hello no ACR).
Till yourself get hacked because the connected-to-the-internet TV is running an insecure software version. We should legal action the hell out of such practices.
My decision to never allow lg devices to connect to the internet never felt smarter than today.
One user mentions that LG also enabled content-aware data mining: https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1plldqo/...
ACR has been going on for at least a decade now. It's the reason TVs are so cheap now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
I really use to like LG products, but between your link and this, I will never buy LG again. They were added to the same list Samsung was added to years ago.
It is like these companies do not want to sell what people really want, but only want to spy on you. The way things are going, it will be back to the old crt TVs, which you can still find used if you look hard enough.
When it comes to technology Korean brands are really the worst. I'd never buy anything from Samsung or LG, not even a bread toaster.
Yeah I would have switched from Apple to Samsung years ago but Samsung are agregious when it comes to control and privacy I don't want to have anything from them in the house.
The Korean car brands, Hyundai and Kia also have a terrible privacy story. They really do regard their customers as the product.
Thinking about how my television was only ever on the internet for 5 minutes in 2016. It must think the world is tiny.
Why does a TV need Microsoft Copilot? While I think AI on the whole is a long-term net positive, but I just cannot understand Microsoft's insistence on putting Copilot everywhere. Even in places where it has no business being and against the user's wishes. I cannot remember the last time a company was this tone deaf. Why isn't Satya Nadella personally getting involved already? Seriously inexcusable.
Just don't connect your tv to the internet. Get an Apple TV or an Nvidia Shield.
As a reminder, turn off the "Live Plus" thing on your LG TV. This "option" makes your LG TV spy on you, tracking and reporting what you watch based on the image that is shown on the TV.
You need to go to Settings -> All Settings -> General -> System -> Additional Settings to make sure the "Live Plus" option is OFF.
Check it periodically, as it sometimes turns itself back on again after updates.
The enshittification of our world is beyond words.
These are domain block rules I got from a previous HN thread about LG shenanigans. No idea if it is still up to date.
In general you should turn off software updates
Why anyone would allow their TV to connect to the internet is beyond me.
Ah! I can finally chat to my TV by writing text to it and have it hallucinate shows that don't exist, or tell me I'm right about everything. Possibly even create PR for work from my LG smart TV, my boss will be pleased.
Just like I wanted!
Now I know why my wife needed the account login information this morning.
This is beyond tiresome.
Yet again regulators are caught lacking. This is so predictable and yet not illegal. I guess they just wait for bribes to come in.
Who the fuck still watches content on an effing TV in 2025?
How else would you watch things with other people at home? Are you going to huddle around your desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.?
All the people who weren't raised on a phone or tablet shoved in front of them since they were a toddler...
I only watch films on a 6" phone display as God intended
Me. It seems like the best kind of display for a game console.
Everyone except weird nerds. 97% of US households have a TV, usually a smart one they watch streaming apps through nowadays.
Fewer even own a desktop or laptop computer. Using one as a media center is comparably fringe.
Probably half the planet